The September edition of the Dead Poets Reading Series will be in partnership with Word Vancouver - check out the listing for our event at their site, and other great events!
Our afternoon will feature these amazing poets:
Hope Lauterbach reading W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)
Rob Taylor reading Danny Peart (1964-2025)
Adrient Drobnies reading George Oppen (1908-1984)
Carleigh Baker reading Anne Sexton (1928-1974)
Date/Time: September 14th, 3:00pm – 4:45pm
Location: Outsiders and Others (#100 – 938 Howe Street, Vancouver).
This is a masks-required event to keep things as safe as possible for everyone.
Reader Bios
Hope Lauterbach is a Zambian Canadian writer and poet, and founder of the Unbound Reading Series, an annual literary event that highlights Black writers. Her work has been commissioned for the Fraser Valley Literary Festival, and appears in Contemporary Verse 2, emerge 21: The Writer's Studio anthology, and Pearls. Hope currently resides in that place between sleep and awake, and is working on her first poetry manuscript.
Rob Taylor is the author of five poetry collections, including Weather and The News. Rob is also the editor of What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation and Best Canadian Poetry 2019. He teaches creative writing at the University of the Fraser Valley, and lives with his family in Port Moody, BC, on the unceded territories of the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.
Adrienne Drobnies is a poet and scientist living in Vancouver on the territories of the Coast Salish people. Her first book of poetry Salt and Ashes won the Fred Kerner Award from the Canadian Authors Association. Her poem “Randonnées” won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Award and was shortlisted for the CBC Literary Prize. She is an editor of the anthology Standing on High Ground about the resistance to the TMX pipeline expansion. She is currently working on a second book of poetry.
Carliegh Baker s an author and teacher of Métis and European descent. Born and raised on Stó:lō territory, she currently lives on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy ̓ əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səl̓ilwəta. Her debut story collection, Bad Endings, won the City of Vancouver Book Award, and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Indigenous Voices Award for fiction. Her short stories and essays have been translated into several languages, and anthologized in North America and Europe. Her new story collection, Last Woman, has been nominated for the 2025 Jim Deva Prize for writing that provokes. Visit her column, Bizarre Celebrations, at Hazlitt.net. As a researcher Baker is most interested in how fiction can be used to address the climate crisis. She was a 2019/20 Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, where she sometimes teaches creative writing.
Dead Poets Bios
William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer, and literary critic. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and one of the founders of Abbey Theatre (also known as the National Theatre of Ireland). He was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature, and later served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. From a young age, Yeats studied poetry and had a fascination with Irish legends and the occult. He is regarded as a great symbolic poet, his mystical interests forming much of the basis of his late poetry.
Danny Peart (1964 - 2025) was the author of four books, including Not Quite So Handsome and Ruined by Love. He was also that guy you saw at just about every poetry event, including many a DPRS reading, with a big grin on his face. Born in Port Dalhousie, Ontario, Danny spent the last three decades in Vancouver, with his wife Janette and his sons Max and Nick.
George Oppen (1908-1984) was born to a wealthy family in New York. In 1930 he moved to France where he and his wife Mary established presses as part of a group of objectivist poets, and he published his first book. With the rise of Fascism in Europe, Oppen became increasingly political. Back in the US, under threat during the McCarthy era he moved to Mexico. He was able to return in 1958 and began writing and publishing again after a lapse of nearly 30 years. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for his book On Being Numerous.
Anne Sexton (1928-1974) "Anne Sexton’s poetry tells stories that are immensely significant to mid-twentieth-century artistic and psychic life. Sexton understood her culture’s malaise through her own, and her skill enabled her to deploy metaphorical structures at once synthetic and analytic … Sexton explored the myths by and through which our culture lives and dies: the archetypal relationships among mothers and daughters, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, gods and humans, men and women. She perceived, and consistently patterned in the images of her art, the paradoxes deeply rooted in human behavior and motivation. Her poetry presents multiplicity and simplicity, duality and unity, the sacred and the profane, in ways that insist on their similarities—even, at times, their identity. In less abstract terms, Sexton made explicit the intimacy of forces persistently treated as opposites by the society she lived in."
-Diane Hume George, editor of The Selected Poems of Anne Sexton (Houghton Mifflin, 1988)
